1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5481
5482
5483
5484
5485
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 49f72c0 | Top-down language teaching just does not work well - it's like learning to ride a bicycle in theory, without ever getting on one. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 676fbe6 | It is when we go beyond instinct that we seem most idiosyncratically human. Perhaps, as Darwin suggested, the difference is one of degree rather than kind; it is quantitative, not qualitative. | Matt Ridley | ||
| d46c645 | Nobody ever saw a dog make fair and deliberate exchange of a bone with another dog. | Matt Ridley | ||
| dd68b2c | The restaurant business is robust and successful precisely because individual restaurants are vulnerable and short-lived. Taleb wishes that society honoured ruined entrepreneurs as richly as it honours fallen soldiers. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 69bded2 | God, Smith just as surely defenestrated Leviathan. | Matt Ridley | ||
| d996689 | The influential 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica goes to the opposite extreme from the Encyclopedie: social history is buried within biography. So to read about the post-Roman world you must look up the entry on Attila the Hun. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 9b7d708 | The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 9835565 | No, what really works inside a big firm is division of labour: you do what you're good at, I'll do what I'm good at, and we'll coordinate our actions. That is what actually happens in practice inside most companies, and good management means good coordination. The employees specialise and exchange, just like participants in a market, or citizens in a city. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 8f28b8e | The real cause of poverty today - now that it is avoidable - is the unchecked power of the state against poor people without rights, says William Easterly. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 5c39085 | It is an extraordinary fact, unremembered by most, that in the Anglosphere people live by laws that did not originate with governments at all. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 53d196d | every innovation to this day is the result of thousands of people exchanging ideas. | Matt Ridley | ||
| b210a69 | With the first steam engines, the barrier between heat and work was breached, so that coal's energy could now amplify the work of people. | Matt Ridley | ||
| dff903d | Long before he became well known for his atheism, Dawkins was famous for the ideas set out in his book The Selfish Gene. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 7cf3a95 | Trying to replace the common law with a rationally designed law is, he jests, like trying to design a better rhinoceros in a laboratory. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 4f718f5 | It follows a narrative, going from one stage to the next; it creeps rather than jumps; it has its own spontaneous momentum, rather than being driven from outside; it has no goal or end in mind; and it largely happens by trial and error - a version of natural selection. | Matt Ridley | ||
| a850ccc | You put garbage in the rubbish bin; you keep junk in the attic or garage. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 8ce8389 | we all enjoy making other people happy. How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, but the pleasure of seeing it. | Matt Ridley | ||
| eb5c17c | What if morality itself was not handed down from the Judeo-Christian God as a prescription? And was not even the imitation of a Platonic ideal, but was a spontaneous thing produced by social interaction among people seeking to find ways to get along? | Matt Ridley | ||
| 0a59794 | Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that! | Matt Ridley | ||
| bc08825 | The more a country adopted central planning, the better its education system did, but the worse its economic performance - not least because, like Egypt, it churned out many would-be bureaucrats trained to do the central planning. | Matt Ridley | ||
| be92659 | The simple one-way relationship that so entrances our politicians and commentators - education spending in, economic growth out - simply doesn't exist. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 9487631 | Education is not a skyhook from which to hang economic policy; it is an emergent phenomenon. | Matt Ridley | ||
| ce7dfe8 | Thanks largely to Greenblatt's marvellous book The Swerve, I have only recently come to know Lucretius, and to appreciate the extent to which I am, and always have been without knowing it, a Lucretian/Epicurean. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 6f323b6 | A Californian firm called Morning Star Tomatoes has been experimenting with 'self-management' for two decades. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 8223534 | Some are worse off than they were just a few months or years before. But the vast majority of people are much better fed, much better sheltered, much better entertained, much better protected against disease and much more likely to live to old age than their ancestors have ever been. The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going rapidly upwards for 200 years and erratically upwards for 10,000 years before | Matt Ridley | ||
| 16b6f83 | Even allowing for the hundreds of millions who still live in abject poverty, disease and want, this generation of human beings has access to more calories, watts, lumen-hours, square feet, gigabytes, megahertz, light-years, nanometres, bushels per acre, miles per gallon, food miles, air miles, and of course dollars | Matt Ridley | ||
| d74d9da | A corollary of this perspective is that there is no such thing as a perfect market, an equilibrium or an end state. | Matt Ridley | ||
| baeca40 | If God is not needed for morality, and if language is a spontaneous system, then perhaps the king, the pope and the official are not quite as vital to the functioning of an orderly society as they pretend? | Matt Ridley | ||
| 1d93dd7 | The new and crucial ingredient was not the availability of capital, but the advent of market-tested, consumer-driven innovation. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 823f526 | Before Medicaid and Medicare existed, writes the American politician and former doctor Ron Paul, 'every physician understood that he or she had a responsibility towards the less fortunate, and free medical care for the poor was the norm'. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 87939bf | This was socialism without the state. There is no doubt that it would have continued to expand and evolve. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 62d0996 | Let's give a bit less credit to creationists, while we encourage and celebrate the evolution of everything. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 3badf27 | This is not true for other creatures, not even brainy ones like chimpanzees, bottlenose dolphins, parrots and octopi. They may occasionally use tools, they may occasionally shift their ecological niche, but they do not 'raise their standard of living', or experience 'economic growth'. They do not encounter 'poverty' either. They do not progress from one mode of living to another - nor do they deplore doing so. They do not experience agricul.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 3d40366 | Female monkeys, unaware that they are slaves to cultural stereotypes, like things with faces. Male monkeys, unaware that they are doing the bidding of human sexists, like things with moving parts. | Matt Ridley | ||
| e9842ce | men have killed men much more often - on average about ninety-seven times more often - than women have killed women. | Matt Ridley | ||
| c7c0314 | the rich are innately cleverer than the poor, which seems generally unlikely, | Matt Ridley | ||
| fcd5a3e | the first century of the US Federal Reserve's existence has been a failure. Not only has there been incontinent inflation since 1913, the year the Fed came into existence (8 per cent in the preceding 120 years, 2,300 per cent in the succeeding hundred years), but there has been devastating deflation too, and more banking panics, more financial volatility, longer and deeper recessions. | Matt Ridley | ||
| ee4ccc8 | It is the customer who determines what a business is. | Matt Ridley | ||
| f5774b2 | By 2010 the internet had roughly as many hyperlinks as the brain has synapses, and a significant proportion of the whispering that goes on within the internet originates in devices rather than people. It is already virtually impossible to turn the internet off. | Matt Ridley | ||
| dec74e4 | Google has likewise turned itself into a trial-and-error company, by encouraging employees to spend 20 per cent of their time on their own projects. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 77bb958 | I find the world is full of people who think that their dependence on others is decreasing, or that they would be better off if they were more self-sufficient, or that technological progress has brought no improvement in the standard of living, or that the world is steadily deteriorating, or that the exchange of things and ideas is a superfluous irrelevance. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 3c7047b | The four horsemen of the human apocalypse, which cause the most premature and avoidable death in poor countries, are and will be for many years the same: hunger, dirty water, indoor smoke and malaria, which kill respectively about seven, three, three and two people per minute. If you want to do your fellow human beings good, spend your effort on combating those so that people can prosper, ready to meet climate challenges as they arrive. Eco.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 05de5a7 | In short, the explosion in sub-prime lending was a thoroughly top-down, political project, mandated by Congress, implemented by government-sponsored enterprises, enforced by the law, encouraged by the president and monitored by pressure groups. Remember this when you hear people blame the free market for the excesses of the sub-prime bubble. | Matt Ridley | ||
| e817c97 | As Edward Glaeser put it, 'Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers. | Matt Ridley |